ABSTRACT:Grid computing promises users the ability to harness the power of large numbers of heterogeneous, distributed resources: computing resources, data storage systems, instruments, etc. The vision is to enable users and applications to seamlessly access these resources to solve complex, large-scale problems. Scientific, data-intensive applications are no longer being developed as monolithic codes. Instead, standalone application components are combined to process the data in various ways. The applications can now be viewed as complex workflows, which consist of various transformations performed on the data. Because of the large amounts of computation and data involved, these workflows require the power of the Grid to execute efficiently. In the current environment, users need to discover resources manually and schedule the jobs directly onto the Grid, essentially composing detailed workflow descriptions by hand. This leaves users struggling with the complexity of the Grid and weighing which resources to use, where to run the computations, where to access the data, etc. This talk describes Pegasus, which stands for Planning for Execution in Grids. Pegasus was developed at ISI as part of the GriPhyN project. Pegasus is a configurable system that can map and execute complex workflows on the Grid. Pegasus takes an abstract description of a workflow and finds the appropriate data and Grid resources to execute the workflow. Pegasus can take into account dynamic information about existing data products as well as the available system resources. To date Pegasus has been used in a variety of data-intensive applications ranging from high-energy physics, gravitational-wave physics, astronomy and others.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Ewa Deelman is a Research Team Leader at the Center for Grid Technologies at the USC Information Sciences Institute and an Assistant Research Professor at the USC Computer Science Department. Dr. Deelman's research interests include the design and exploration of collaborative scientific environments based on Grid technologies, with particular emphasis on workflow management as well as the management of large amounts of data and metadata. At ISI, Dr. Deelman is part of the Globus project, which designs and implements middleware for the Grid. Dr. Deelman received her PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Computer Science in 1997 in the area of parallel discrete event simulation.